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Atlas Obscura keeps a firm divide between its independent travel journalism and its bookable trips. Now its marketers, like copywriter Nick Papa, create and support a separate content ecosystem for the touring side of the company. Nick’s biggest project is the Trips Blog, which launched at the end of last year. The goal was to go beyond the pure marketing assets, like trip landing pages and sales emails, and create editorial content that ties back to the trips in a “non-salesy” way. Nick dives into how Atlas Obscura is playing the long game, how to succeed at travel during a pandemic, and where both strategies connect to social media and newsletters.

Unlike a lot of companies that need to invest in content, Atlas Obscura started with travel journalism and then became a trip company.

It’s a huge differentiator for us as a tour operator, because exactly like you said, most companies are like, “Well, we have this cool product. Now we have to figure out how to build content around it in a way that’s not salesy.” Content is at the core, so when we launched these products, we had this built-in audience of readers. We had already built so much trust with them that they were, no questions asked, willing to go to literally the far corners of the planet with us. They knew that we knew what we were talking about, which is incredible, because before Atlas, I worked at very big travel companies. I worked at booking.com as a content editor, I have been a contractor at Kayak, and it’s the reverse, where you’re retroactively making the content to make your case. At Atlas Obscura, it just feels so much more natural and organic.

Becky Kane became an editor “totally by accident.” After majoring in political science and using Todoist at her summer internship at a marketing agency, she found an old internship posting on the Todoist blog. Emailing them led to a marketing internship in their small Portugal office (the majority of the company was remote), and after that she took over the company blog, which was just starting the transition from  company announcements and product updates to more general content on productivity and self-improvement. Before her chance internship, she had no idea she could get paid to write like that. “I guess I always had this feeling like, ‘If you’re going to be a writer or a journalist, you’re going to have to be a struggling artist.’”

More than five years later, she’s the Lead Editor at Doist. She splits her time between running their productivity and teamwork blog, Ambition & Balance, and leading or supporting other content side projects, including remote guides for their second product, a team communication app called Twist. 

Did Doist know it wanted the blog to become Ambition & Balance? Or was it the result of content experimentation?

We were an all-remote team. We were using Slack and having a really hard time staying on top of that hose of unstructured information, which would get buried by the time someone in another time zone logged on. So we decided to launch another product that our company felt the need for. We decided to do that without really thinking through how we would add a whole other brand, Twist. Would we have it underneath the Todoist brand? Would we have it be a separate brand? Then if it’s a separate brand, how would we do content for that as well?

[The publication change] was out of necessity. Honestly, we’re a small team. We weren’t going to be able to build and maintain publications for each separate brand. There’s a lot of common themes between the Todoist brand and the Twist brand, as well as our overall company umbrella brand, Doist. Even though we recognized, “Oh, we’re going to be losing a lot of domain juice from the todoist.com domain,” we think it’s worth it. That setback is worth it in order to build a foundation that’s going to be able to grow with the company in the long-term.

So we had to stop, step back and think, “How are we going to make this cohesive for readers?” Most people are interested in Todoist, so how do we make sure that we’re giving them the content that they’re looking for or that they signed up for, while also expanding to talk more about remote work and teamwork in general? That was the conclusion the content team — at the time just me and my boss, Brenna Loury, the head of marketing — came to. We thought, “This is the only feasible way forward for it to be sustainable and doable.” It definitely didn’t come without its costs, but I do think that it was the right choice overall.

Jodi Harris has been with Content Marketing Institute (CMI) for almost nine years. She started as editor of the blog, then transitioned to curating and creating content, as well as helping with strategy for other CMI editorial products. In addition to her role as CMI’s Director of Editorial Content & Strategy, she’s also the editor-in-chief for Chief Content Officer (CCO), CMI’s digital magazine for content executives and team leaders. Jodi describes CCO’s editorial focus as “higher-level, more strategy-oriented, and a little bit more future-facing” than the tactics-driven focus of the CMI blog.

Does your ideal magazine audience already have company buy-in for content investment, or do you cover how to demonstrate the value of content and secure that commitment?

No matter how experienced the company is with content marketing, there’s always a measure of buy-in that’s required. Whether it’s securing buy-in for content marketing in general (which is common at start-ups or organizations that are new to the discipline), gathering the additional support necessary when there’s a need to create content differently or under a new strategy, or whether it’s, “We’re doing this well already. How do we optimize?”

Those innovative ideas may come from the content team or the marketing team, but they need to get buy-in from the executive management and corporate team in order to secure the budget and the permission to move forward — and to make sure everybody understands what they’re trying to do and how it’s going to perform in terms of the business goals, not just the marketing team’s goals.

Though you may recognize Patagonia for the clothes, the catalog, or the overall strength of the brand, Books Director Karla Olson says the company has always had a rich storytelling tradition. Founder Yvon Chouinard climbed six months out of the year and came back with his own stories for the company to publish. Karla thinks his 2006 memoir, Let My People Go Surfing, convinced the company that there are some stories that can’t be told in a 750-word essay in the catalog. Patagonia officially started publishing books in 2007.

When did you join Patagonia Books? How does it fit into the rest of the company? 

I joined the company in 2012. The company had already published 12 books and they knew that it was a good way of communicating with our community and beyond. I often say that the books can go where the clothes can’t go, into bookstores. The books are a good branding tool as well, although we are very careful not to over-communicate our brand. I think we actually end up taking out mentions of Patagonia. We just let the story be the thing that convinces the reader that this is an issue they need to care about, or we let it entertain them in some way.

The goal of the publishing program is to educate people, inspire people, and encourage people to become involved with outdoor places and public lands. We’ve published 50 books, and if you look at them through that lens, they might look really disparate in the beginning, but you start to see that connection.  

What is the goal of this book? What are we trying to get someone to do by reading this book? That is a direct action. They’re going to care about the river system. They’re going to go outside and climb outside on public lands so that they are involved in the fight for public lands. They’re going to learn how to be more effective at environmental activism. They’re going to be encouraged to start a business that has social responsibility involved. Those are all goals that we articulate at the beginning of a project. 

Margarita Noriega joined Glitch a year ago, and has since founded its tech culture publication, Glimmer, which launched in February. Glimmer consists of Podcasts (run by Glitch’s Media team), Original Features (assigned to freelancers), and The Playlist and Starter Kits, which lean more toward content marketing (sourced and written internally). Margarita says you won’t see a ton of content marketing in the podcasts, and you’ll see almost none of it in the original features. Though she reports to Marketing, her role as Principal Editor combines content marketing with editorial.

What made Glitch decide they needed an editor to champion content?

The original Culture Zine came out of a very strong personal love for zine culture at Glitch. I think there was a cultural and technical skill set alignment when Glitch launched and they started producing media formats that really aligned with the skills of the people in the room. Eventually you get to a point where the people in the room cannot tell the stories in the formats you need for other things. At some point, tiny experimental media content doesn’t work as well for general audience brand awareness. 

I was hired to run a zine that wasn’t in print, for a tech company that is really a community, about cultural topics, for an industry that’s been pretty controversially connected to culture. So there were all these threads I had to undo and then try to weave back together. And that led to the Culture Zine becoming Glimmer. 

We were using Ghost for the Culture Zine, and we loved Ghost. We needed something that our brand partners could jump into as a CMS. So we knew we needed to make a choice about ramping up our backend to create a website along with the platform. 

Glitch is already a platform, that’s what we call the Glitch community, and that’s really what you see in the messaging on glitch.com. But there also has to be an engine for creating content that isn’t in an app, that isn’t a zine. We still do a lot of content as apps, but they are very experimental. So from a marketing perspective, editorial perspective, and the media team’s perspective, we needed juicier stuff. 

We chose Prismic, it’s a newer CMS. We’re running Glimmer off of Prismic and that allows us to do all sorts of content strategy we couldn’t do before. And of course, that requires an editor. Before I came to Glitch, I was consulting and contracting for companies, and that included WordPress. So I came in with a certain knowledge of the CMS world.

Framer doesn’t have a traditional marketing team. Four years ago, Asha Indralingam was its first content hire. Even as it grew, nobody at Framer had “marketing” in their job title. Instead it was handled by a mix of the content and design teams. Now that the product is changing, the marketing needs are changing too. Asha is now Head of Content, and her team has grown to cover marketing while maintaining a content and editorial focus.

It must be nice to build the marketing side from the ground up with such a focus on content, rather than coming in later and having to figure out where a content team fits into a company.

Yeah, I’ve also been lucky because the founders are very into quality content. They are into maintaining the quality of our brand, but the content factors into that, very much so. Not a lot of companies give you the free rein to really try doing that with content without immediately telling you to run some ads or do some aggressive growth marketing hack.

There’s a very typical struggle at a lot of companies between the content team and the design team. We’ve definitely had our share of that. We’ve finally gone to a good place with a lot of things on the marketing side, where the content is leading design. Now that the designers have seen firsthand that it’s actually amazing to have messaging in place before we start coming up with ideas for the visual design, that has been super successful.